Posted on 01/02/2006 11:59:40 AM PST by blam
Thoughtful Hunters
An interdisciplinary research programme, 2004-2007, at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University sponsored by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO).
THe Research Programme
From about 500,000 BP onwards, Europe saw a continuous occupation by occasionally very small and rather isolated groups of hominins. The typical cold-adapted Neanderthals of the last glacial were the product of a long process of Neanderthalisation that developed during the last half million years under severe climatic stress. Over the last five years archaeological studies have shown that these Middle and Late Pleistocene hominins, in contrast to previous opinions, were capable hunters of a wide variety of large game. Studies of the stable isotopes from their skeletal remains strongly suggest that they were “top-level carnivores”, with animal protein constituting an important part of their diet.
As it's title suggests, the present research programme' Thoughtful Hunters? The Archaeology of Neanderthal Communication and Cognition', focuses on the behavioural and cognitive - next to cultural and technological - presuppositions of Neanderthal hunting. A key question is whether the 'quality education' needed to become an expert hunter was possible without the transcendence of the here and now and a release from proximity by symbolic and syntactical language?
This question will be addressed in terms of data and viewpoints provided by palaeolithic archaeology, primate evolutionary ecology, comparative anatomy, ethnography, and cognitive neuroscience. The program will build upon recent work on the dependence on hunting in connection with the size of home ranges in predators; the increase in energetically expensive brain size in connection with changes in diet and gender roles in hominins; physical-anthropological clues as to the sexual division of labor in Neanderthals; the considerable need of daily foraging returns in Neanderthals; simulated minimal palaeolithic group sizes and primatology-based predictions of palaeolithic group sizes; and the social setting of hunting in behavioural-ecological perspective.
In the picture emerging from this research sophisticated knowledge of animal behaviours as a prerequisite for hunting success seems to loom large. According to Kaplan et al. 2000 (p.170-172), hunting “is the most learning-intensive foraging strategy practiced by humans (…). Unlike most animals, which either sit and wait to ambush prey or use stealth and pursuit techniques, human hunters use a wealth of information to make context-specific decisions, both during the search phase of hunting and after prey is encountered. Specifically, information on ecology, seasonality, current weather, expected animal behaviour and fresh animal signs are all integrated to form multivariate mental modules of encounter probabilities that guide the search and are continually updated as conditions change.”
This information is collected, memorized and processed over large spaces. The skill-intensive nature of human hunting and the long learning process involved are illustrated dramatically by recently reported data on hunting return rates by age. Hunting the variety of sometimes very dangerous species we now know to have been hunted by Neanderthals in Pleistocene Europe must have required considerable experience, quality education, and years of intensive practice. Hence there was a strong evolutionary stimulus on cooperation and sharing information between older and younger members of a group. But to what extent was language involved?
Recent work on skills and their acquisition stresses creative mimetic/imitative routines and suggest the possibility of highly complex behaviours - such as seen in connection with megafauna hunting - without much need of linguistic representations.
It is only very recently that some palaeoanthropologists have come to realize that the network of interdependencies, such as the aforementioned ones, "allows us to construct hypotheses about those aspects of the lifestyles of our early ancestors that are not directly preserved in the fossil or archaeological records. It is also possible through this approach to construct models relevant to the broader adaptive niches of our early ancestors and the selective pressures that would have been important during the course of human evolutionary history” (Aiello 1998:25).
This methodological point is germane to the research program, which sets out to construct a model that puts constraints on interpretations of the cognitive and behavioural aspects of Neanderthal hunting.
The present program, Thoughtful Hunters? The Archaeology of Neanderthal Communication and Cognition, builds upon and is a spin-off of the successful interdisciplinary research program, Changing Views of Ice Age Foragers, 1993-1998, also at the Archaeology Department of Leiden University and sponsored by NWO/the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research.
SUBPROJECT 1: NEANDERTHAL COMMUNICATION AND LEARNING (KATHY MACDONALD, PHD)
This project will start with a review of the burgeoning research on communication among pre-modern hominins, including studies on animal communication and various theories on the emergence of full-fledged language. The aim of this review will be to identify some constraints on hypotheses about hominin communication, and identify likely scenarios for communication among Neanderthal hunters. Theories about Neanderthal communication need to take account of increasing archaeological evidence for relatively complex (technological and hunting) behaviours, and for changes in behaviour among later Neanderthals.
Ethnographic data on present-day hunting by traditional foragers and western hunters will be studied, with a focus on hunting difficulties and the learning processes behind hunting activities. What is the role of active, linguistic instruction rather than emulation or imitation (sensu Boesch and Tomasello, 1998)? What do people need to know in order to hunt successfully? What is the role of communication in human hunting? A relevant theoretical framework is constituted by the approach to knowledge and learning of skills advocated by Tim Ingold (2000). The results of this study will be brought to bear on what is known archaeologically on Neanderthal hunting, and the various theories on Neanderthal communication.
While most workers see hunting as the most learning-intensive foraging strategy practiced by humans, some do not share this view, and refuse to relate the extended youth of modern and earlier humans to such learning. This is an interesting viewpoint, which needs clarification, and provides a link to the themes of subproject 3.
SUBPROJECT 2: The Archaeology of Neanderthal Subsistence (Gerrit Dusseldorp, MA)
This research project consists of three related parts.
1) An extensive review of the hunting vs scavenging debate, with a focus on the possible relevance of earlier models – and especially the building blocks of the largely discredited Man the Hunter model – for current research. This part can profit from a rich literature on this topic, in particular various monographs and review papers dealing with this very issue, including recent work on hunting by chimpanzees and other primates.
2) Bringing in new evidence from Europe, ongoing work in the Levant, and new evidence from Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora, a chronological overview of hominin hunting and hunting techniques will be developed. Primate modelling and recent studies of chimpanzee hunting are used to make inferences regarding the earliest stages of hominin hunting.
3) There is an additional source of clues for imitative skill, planning depth, and complexity of communication, connected with data on hunting: the dynamic interplay between hominin mobility patterns and specialized as well as generalized activities in the landscape. Generating reconstructions of such dynamic systems from static archaeological data with considerable time-depth is not easy. Yet, there are ways of tackling this, such as the archaeological analysis of patterns of raw materials transport through the landscape and analysis of the chaines opératoires of certain artifact types (e.g., handaxes) at the landscape scale. Building upon such studies inferences will be made on how hunting hominins positioned themselves in the landscape.
SUBPROJECT 3: HominiN life Histories and the Human Niche (Najma Anwar, PhD)
This part of the project focuses on the constraints, in human evolutionary history, on anatomical and behavioural trade-offs in various environments and periods, in order elucidate the evolutionary pressures involved. Most behavioural or evolutionary-ecological studies have focused on modern humans, analyzing life histories, mating strategies, spatial behaviour, subsistence and cooperation. Such studies consistently stress the wide network of interrelated constraints and dependencies involved with any of these issues. In line with this, Subproject 3 consists in building a biological-anthropological skeleton of the social behaviour of Neanderthals, drawing upon previous work by Aiello (1998) and Roebroeks (2001). Interdependencies stressed by various disciplines will be evaluated and refined, focussing on selection for cooperation and sharing, caloric requirements, sexual division of labour, the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (Aiello & Wheeler 1995), the Social Brain Hypothesis (Aiello & Dunbar 1993; Dunbar 1998), and the long period of development in humans. Humans, including Neanderthals, take 18 to 20 years to grow up, a prolonged growth that arose relatively late in evolution, in interdependence with modern human-like brain size and related to extensive learning processes.
PROGRAM COORDINATION (Wil Roebroeks, PhD and Raymond Corbey, PhD)
Program Director is Wil Roebroeks, PhD, who holds the chair of palaeolithic archaeology at Leiden University. He coordinates the three projects, in particular focusing on the interpretation of archaeological data in terms of the program's research questions and theoretical viewpoints.
Raymond Corbey, PhD is responsible for interdisciplinary and theoretical coordination, with special attention to ethnological and/vs biological views of reciprocity and exchange and recent work on the role of 'embedded' or 'embodied' cognition in human evolution.
AFFILIATED RESEARCH: Upper Palaeolithic humans (Alexander Verpoorte, PhD)
Alexander Verpoorte is conducting his own research on early Upper Palaeolithic societies of west Eurasia in close cooperation with the present program, with an eye on similarities and differences between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic subsistence behaviours, in particular hunting.
CONTACT INFORMATION
POSTAL ADDRESS: Dept. of Archaeology, PO Box 9515, NL 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands.
STREET ADDRESS: Dept. of Archaeology, Reuvensplaats 3, Leiden, the Netherlands.
STREET MAP: http://www.leidenuniv.nl/kaart/stad_detail_links-onder.htm
TELEPHONE: +31 (0)71527 -2447 (O.Yates)
"Ye gods, the prose! The prose! Would it not be a good thing to ritually slaughter one or two of the worst-writing academics each year?"
I could not have said it better. Why use a ten word sentence when thirty words are better? Larger words always clarify meaning! Why use common terms when stuffy ones are clearly better?
Perhaps a Neanderthal or two should have been saved to hunt down the miscreant academics whose prose certainly kills.
YEP !!
"Neanderthal hunting methods involved hand to hoof combat, and injuries were common."
I read sometime back that the injuries of stone-age hunters, both Neanderthals and Humans, resemble those of rodeo cowboys more than anything else in modern times.
"pompous bloviation"
Extra credit for adding sesquipedalianism to pompous bloviation.
Interestingly, such hunting techniques are still in occasional use. A moose hunter leaped onto the back of his prey here a few years ago and beat the beast into submission. It took considerable time, but it was effective since moose are not familiar with this kind of attack: if we still had big cats it might have been a different story. There were witnesses, some of whom still comment on the technique with derision.
;^)
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